Hi I'm Mike, the one who graduated LJMU in 2007 and has worked at places like miniclip.com, Tri Line, IX Reach, Eze Talk & Oxfam. I'm an "all round IT Professional" with commercial experience of high traffic mission critical websites, networks, databases and virtualization platforms. I use open source software almost as much as I use the command line :) I love live music, fishing, fiddling with computers, speakers, networks, PHP and anything techie or mechanical.

f-secure.com released an article yesterday documenting malware published from Twitch.tv's channel chat feature. The channel chat is displayed next to the video player allowing viewers to interact with the broadcaster while watching gaming live streams. Since release this has always been a spammy place to hang out with the level of interaction on par with YouTube comments and more often than not flooded with view bots and idiots.

The malware in question isn't anything special, it's a malicious Java application which when granted permission to execute has the potential to allow remote control of Windows systems, no surprise there. The ago old saying "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is" or the more recent saying "don't click on stupid things" seem to hold true although there are possibly some exceptions, maybe er probably not...

Everybody likes free stuff

The incentive for users to click the link is the chance to win; not an offer to give away, in game items for Counter Strike normally acquired by purchasing credits from Steam. I think it's interesting how effective Twitch can be as an advertising platform when used; or in this case abused, with targeted advertisements to the correct audience.

Twitch was recently acquired by Amazon and like Google buying YouTube the sites advertising revenue just helps to keep the lights on admittedly at a mind-boggling scale. The real value comes from mining and expanding the vast volume of social interaction data and later integrating it into their own services.